The rain had been falling since Beaumont.

Sandra Landau — Jewel to everyone who mattered, which wasn’t many people left anymore — watched the highway lights blur through the wet glass and tried not to think about what she’d left behind. Couldn’t think about it. The Ninth Ward wasn’t a place anymore. It was a wound.

Houston arrived the way big cities do when you come from somewhere smaller, or somewhere that used to be — sudden, sprawling, indifferent. The exit signs read like someone else’s map. She had her mother’s address on a folded napkin in her coat pocket, still damp from the shelter in Baton Rouge where a Red Cross volunteer had handed her a phone and told her she had five minutes.

Five minutes to locate fifteen years of silence.

Francine had answered on the second ring. That surprised her. Her mother’s voice — older, careful, braced — said Sandra the way people say a name when they’re relieved and afraid at the same time. Said come. Said please.

Jewel didn’t know what she’d expected. Closed doors. Conditions. Francine Landau had always operated with conditions. But the storm had washed conditions away, same as it had washed away so many things that couldn’t be replaced.

The cab driver said nothing. He had the radio low — emergency frequencies, evacuation routes, a number you could call if you were looking for someone. Jewel pressed her forehead against the cool glass and watched a city that didn’t know her yet move past, steady and lit, carrying on under rain that didn’t mean anything here the way it meant something back home.

She thought about Dwayne and Purnell. Francine’s grandsons. Her nephews. Boys she barely knew — boys her mother had built a separate life around. A life that excluded Jewel, that had to exclude Jewel, for reasons nobody had ever spoken out loud.

Now the storm had made the unspoken unavoidable.

The cab turned down a residential block. Porch lights. Wet concrete. A magnolia tree that had held.

She touched the napkin in her pocket.

The secret had survived Katrina too.